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ADS-B

Introduction

Having bought an RTL-SDR compatible dongle recently I thought I could see what I could make it do. So one for the first things I did successfully was tracking planes using ADS-B.

ADS-B or Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast) is used to track Aircraft, each plane is fitted with a transmitter which broadcasts its position, heading, altitude, identification and a number of other things on 1090MHz.

Windows

I first made it work quite simply in Windows using adsb# which can be found here:
http://sdrsharp.com/index.php/a-simple-and-cheap-ads-b-receiver-using-rtl-sdr

This connects to the dongle, tunes it to the right frequency and begins decoding the packets and pumping the out on port 47806.

The next thing to do is to use something like ADSB Scope (http://www.sprut.de/electronic/pic/projekte/adsb/adsb_en.html#downloads) to connect to adsb# and plot the packets to actually see some planes moving.

I did this with limited success:

I left it running over night and whilst I was at work and managed to get a fairly long list of planes that had gone by: